ore than 300 people attended the rally, hosted by Congregations United to Serve Humanity, which announced its campaign for immigration reform as a local effort coordinated as part of a national campaign.
A group of Chicago-area religious and civic leaders met with Gov. Pat Quinn at a North Shore synagogue aiming to send him back to Springfield with a mission: clean up Illinois politics.
CHICAGO (CBS) An effort to bridge the gap between cultures and communities drew more than a thousand people to a South Side church Sunday. Local Jews and Christians gathered there, as CBS 2's Pamela Jones reports, with a lesson the two groups are hoping to learn. The members of the two congregations want to put the love and peace they both learn from their faith into practice – not just today, but in their everyday lives.
One weekday morning in 1981, when he was new to Baltimore, Arnold Graf descended into the basement of the Enon Baptist Church. The steps took him into the midst of 60 skeptics. They were the black ministers whom Mr. Graf, a white Jew, was trying to persuade to join him in community organizing.
Congregation Sha'ar Zahav in San Francisco was transformed - at least briefly - into City Hall last week when it was the site of a major announcement about the city’s universal health care plan. The progressive Reform synagogue was a perfect place for the June 18 announcement, since its members played a significant role in the city's decision to expand the plan, called Healthy San Francisco.
With the establishment of Sound Alliance, a coalition of labor, social action organizations, faith-based organizations, and religious communities pledged to working toward a common social agenda, a new role for Jews in such movements has come to the fore — the participation of Jews as Jews, through the formal association of congregations with Sound Alliance.
I. Am. A. Citizen. Imagine this chanted like a mantra by 612 people. I. Am. A. Citizen. The words echoed in an overcrowded gymnasium. Rabbi Lavey Derby stood at the front of the room, conducting the audience in the refrain: I am a citizen.
Helping others and bettering the community -- "healing the world," as tikkun olam translates from Hebrew -- are ancient themes in Judaism. This has most commonly been done through social action -- planned events like feeding the homeless, visiting the elderly and cleaning up a neighborhood. But in the past few years, there has been an explosion among American Jewry, particularly within the Reform movement, to do more than just treat a symptom.
Through social justice, they want to cure the illness.
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